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Legal Threats Against MPlayer, Server To Disappear

04-08-2011, 10:20 AM

Phoronix: Legal Threats Against MPlayer, Server To Disappear

While legal threats to free software projects would be disastrous (if successful) to those seeking to destroy Linux and open-source work, there's sure been lots of in-fighting as of late that's proving to be quite damaging for many distinguished projects. OpenOffice.org to LibreOffice or KOffice to Caligra Office Suite may be "good forks", but last month some core developers forked FFmpeg to libav to abandon other developers/ There's also been the MPLayer2 fork of MPlayer. But now also on the multi-media front is some ill-detailed threats that is leading to the loss of one of the main MPlayer developers and all services that he provides to the project, including their central server...

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Id like to clarify that there was and is no legal threat from me to
anyone.
I have no plans to involve any lawyers, any court, nothing like this.
And even less so would i do something like that to attila.

I still think having ffmpeg.mplayerhq.hu point to libav is a scam and
should be changed but theres no legal threat from me because of this.

Comment

Of course the libav fork is somewhat questionable, because of all the drama around it, but calling it a "bad fork" outright is poor taste and poor journalism, IMHO. The situation is very difficult to decipher, though I have tried. By the way, the "certain project leader" in question couldn't be Michael Niedermayer, could it? Because that is the ffmpeg project leader, and if that's the things he does, I kinda understand where the libav team were coming from. Then again, it might be somebody else, because Attila Kinali isn't providing any names.

While I understand the tension around libav, mplayer2, in my opinion, cannot be called a bad fork in any way. It just takes mplayer a different direction, that is all. If I were the leader of mplayer2, I'd be offended by Phoronix right now for this groundless accusation.

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I found Kinali's quote of Ursula Le'Guin's "The Dispossessed" interesting. She has been one of my favorite authors, and this one of my favorite books, since the 1970's. Time to go back and re-read them I think... :-)

Anyway, back on topic. Sometimes you just have to cut the cord and move on. Losing a major contributor (both in time, IP, and resources it seems) can be a serious blow to an open source project like this. Sometimes they are handled well, and others... not so. I think that the OOo -> LibreOffice split was sensible, and after seeing Vitagnoli at the Flourish! conference in Chicago last weekend, I understand better why he did what he did. I don't think that the mplayer -> mplayer2 split will work out quite so well, unfortunately.

Comment

I found Kinali's quote of Ursula Le'Guin's "The Dispossessed" interesting. She has been one of my favorite authors, and this one of my favorite books, since the 1970's. Time to go back and re-read them I think... :-)

Anyway, back on topic. Sometimes you just have to cut the cord and move on. Losing a major contributor (both in time, IP, and resources it seems) can be a serious blow to an open source project like this. Sometimes they are handled well, and others... not so. I think that the OOo -> LibreOffice split was sensible, and after seeing Vitagnoli at the Flourish! conference in Chicago last weekend, I understand better why he did what he did. I don't think that the mplayer -> mplayer2 split will work out quite so well, unfortunately.

Oops! Wrong spelling. It should have been Vignoli, not Vitagnoli! Sorry Italo - my bad!